Sunday, July 30, 2017

Adventure in Oz

Last week if you'd asked me "What was the first Oz video or computer game?" I would have said the Windham Classics Wizard of Oz. But I happened to be looking through the Classic Adventure Solution Archive yesterday, and I randomly decided to search "Oz."

So, knowing there's a huge subculture of emulating old computer games online, I hit Google to see if I could find more information on this game, or even, find how to download and play the game myself. By the time I went to bed, I found a blog entry from someone who had managed to emulate and play the game and three different downloads of the game, plus finding it in another format and finding an emulator to run it.

The platform for the game was the TI-99/4A, a short-lived early computer from Texas Instruments. How was the game packaged?

This isn't box art. It's cover art. "Same thing," some classic gamers might say, but wrong. This is a book. Instead of putting the games on disks, tapes or cartridges for sale, the code for the game was printed in the book and those wanting to play it had to enter it manually before they could. Well, you don't risk getting a corrupted file. Just have to make sure you do it right and not get a typo. The fun thing is, the book is available for free online viewing at Archive.org. This means that if you REALLY want to play it old school, you can type in all twelve pages of code into an emulator and create the files you'd need to play the game. Luckily for me, it was already done and available in three different places.

"Adventures in Oz" requires a number of expansions to play. In the emulator Win994a, I had to go to preferences, turn on the memory expansion option, turn it to the 16Bit Fast addressing, and the speech synthesizer. Furthermore, you have to load the TI Extended Basic cartridge, which the emulator comes supplied with an emulated version of. After loading the disk and the cartridge images into the emulator, it's time to get started. You press a key to begin the emulator, select the number for the Extended Basic prompt, and then enter the command—in all caps—RUN "DSK1.OZ" and press enter.

Alternately, you could enter RUN "DSK1.RAINBOW" and hear a computer system from 1983 synthesize "Over the Rainbow" in one minute...

A post shared by OzCon International (@ozconinternational) on Jul 29, 2017 at 8:27pm PDT

Anyway, on to the actual game.

The game features fairly decent graphics by 1983 computer game standards, a few synthesized bars of "Off To See The Wizard," as well as some sound effects and the above mentioned version of "Over the Rainbow."

Pressing any key launches the opening text/cinematic that identifies the player as taking the role of Dorothy and gets the idea across that you're carried in your house by tornado to the Land of Oz.

You start randomly in a location in Oz, and yes, all you do is press keys, each location giving you some sort of message. If you're trying to play, pro-tip, keep the caps lock key on as entering commands in lower case does nothing.

What exactly does the Map key do?

It brings up a book-based map of Oz, which shows your location with an X, so it's possible to get an idea of where you are. Steve Davis (no relation, as far as I know) says it's based on the International Wizard of Oz Club's map, which is why the Munchkins are on the right side of the screen, rather than a design matching Baum's Tik-Tok of Oz endpaper map. Yes, the in-game screens are colored to match the region of Oz you're in.

So, the concept of the game is that you go to the Emerald City to meet the Wizard, who promises to send you back if you complete one of four tasks he gives you: get the Woggle-Bug's magic powder, Glinda's ruby slippers, Ozma's magic belt, or the Wicked Witch's Golden Cap. After receiving your orders, you must head out into that section of Oz to find the item you're looking for and return to the Emerald City.

Matching the tone of Oz and pre-dating The Secret of Monkey Island, this is a game where you can't lose and can't die, so you're free to explore Oz as you wish, but the game asks you to play in as few turns as possible. Going to a blocked off area (bodies of water or the Deadly Desert) results in no progress and a turn wasted. Checking the map also uses a turn.

I completed my first game in 88 turns, where I was tasked to get the Golden Cap from the Wicked Witch. I headed west from Emerald City, crossed a river and finally found the Wicked Witch.

I was using the first version of the game that I'd found for this one, which the other guy's blog entry said had typographical errors, so I assume those graphic glitches are a result of that. (Also, "Muncchkin.")

I was a little stuck for what to do here until a little cinematic
started. I watched in surprise as a mass of black pixels representing
Toto moved across the screen and a yellow patch appeared under the
Witch, who disappeared into it.

With that done, it was back tracking to the Emerald City, and the game was complete. With a full round of "Over The Rainbow," I was back at the command prompt.

So, surprisingly, this old game actually has replay value with a varying quest and over 700 locations, probably at least half of them I didn't see on this play-through. Also, the game can be completed in a rather short time.

It's also a concept I'd like to see in a new Oz video game, exploring the Land of Oz with varying quests and puzzles. With the leaps and bounds computer and video games have come in the last 34 years, it could be quite an interesting game.

I stopped my writing to do another playthrough with a different disk image I found. This time I was tasked to get the Woggle-Bug's magic powder (Powder of Life or... ???), ran into a couple "Wishway" locations that can randomly teleport you anywhere in Oz, and a road that takes you in the reverse direction that you want to go in. Also, there was a skywriting witch cinematic in the Emerald City, although if anything comes of this, I don't know. So, the game uses the Land of Oz from Baum's books with music and touches from the MGM film, and also some elements from Ruth Plumly Thompson's books.

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